


black and white/white and red

by cerebel



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-11
Updated: 2012-08-11
Packaged: 2017-11-11 22:37:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/483630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerebel/pseuds/cerebel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Camile hates Everett Young.</p><p>Doesn't she?</p>
            </blockquote>





	black and white/white and red

“I did the best I could.”

Rush’s voice is hushed, beaten, and when the words hit Camile’s ears, she feels like she’s choking on dust. Like when her mother used to beat carpets with a stick, out in their driveway, clouds of gray rising and dissipating into the morning mist. Choking.

“What do you mean, you did the best you could?” She keeps her voice even. She’s proud of that. It’s not an easy feat. Not with wrists raw from corded ropes, with her shoulder stinging from the near-miss, with her eyes heavy and dry with all the crying she didn’t do.

“I found you a good planet,” says Rush, and that’s when the guards come. They gesture him back, with guns and stern faces that blur together after too long. They feel to Camile like individual units of a larger machine. Lucian Alliance clones. Factory-fresh, brainwashed, stamped with Kiva’s logo and ready for battle. 

It’s a silly fantasy, a silly mental image, but she clings to it as they half-lead, half-drag her through the ship. Feet stumbling, legs not responding, pins and needles rushing up and down abused veins.

When they make it to the gate room, the stargate is full of bright rippling blue. 

The cord-pressure around her wrists abruptly releases, and her shoulders scream with the fresh agony. 

Another group of guards shoves Colonel Young in. He looks worse off than her. Mottled bruising on his face, dried blood in a disfiguring drip down the bridge of his nose. 

He’s steady, at least. She staggers just to remain standing.

The Lucian Alliance soldiers stand in a ragged semi-circle, Kiva in the center, Rush behind the console, flanked by two more. 

“We had a deal,” says Young. 

Camile closes her eyes. Those four words, she thinks, have become the bane of her existence. 

“You both are worse than useless to me,” says Kiva, in tones clipped and precise. “You will be centers of dissent. I cannot have that.” 

She nods to the gate. 

When Camile turns her head to Rush, he looks away. 

“I am a fair winner,” says Kiva. “You both will have a fighting chance. These are two basic survival packs, standard offworld gear, if I remember correctly. Dr. Rush assures me this world is habitable, according to the Ancient database.” Her arms cross. “We will not return. We will not retaliate against any member of your crew. You have my word; so long as you both walk through that stargate.” 

When she was ten years old, Camile Wray was in Safety Patrol at her elementary school. It suited her well. They took only the most responsible and levelheaded of the students. She used to take the hands of six-year-olds as she walked them down the sidewalk to the crossing guard. She smiled at the little ones on the first day of school and told them not to be afraid. On that day, she was convinced of one thing, and one thing only: that someday, she would be a hero. 

Today, in the gate room of a ship across the universe from that elementary school, she wishes she’d never had such a fucking moronic dream. 

Still, though.

Today, as Young hesitates, Camile picks up her pack, turns to the gate, and walks through. Without a word.

~*~

She trips and falls on the other side of the gate. Palms skidding scraped over the stone ramp, but it doesn’t hurt as much as it should. When she picks herself up, she finds out why, and finds out why she tripped. 

The gravity. She’s no good at estimating, but it’s lower. Definitely lower than Earth’s. 

Everything around her is silver-white. Blinding, as her pupils flicker and adjust, as she blinks. 

A forest. But not a forest of trees. A forest of plants shaped like arches, like upside-down Us, a world that looked like she’d stepped into someone else’s imagination. Some of the arches look big enouh to walk under. Some are just big enough to trip over. Miles of silver arches, as far as the eye can see, until there was the smudge of a red mountain in the distance, rising jagged enough to slice the sky.

Behind Camile, the stargate spits out a traveler and disengages.

Young doesn’t trip. His steps are slow, in caution or shock, and he stops beside her. 

“It’s beautiful,” says Camile, in frustrated grief. A beauty that adds insult to injury.

Young clears his throat. He steps past her, without a word, and she can feel the waves of helpless, utter fury boiling off of him. 

In college, Camile Wray took and dropped physics III: electricity and magnetism three times before she passed it. 

To this day, she doesn’t know when to quit. 

She follows him, ducking under one of the arches. 

“We should talk about this,” she suggests.

“Talk about what?”

“We have to learn to survive.” 

Whatever reaction she’s expecting, she doesn’t get it.

Young yells in rage and _slams_ his fist into one of the arches. The soft flesh of it gives way, caving in with the softness of a mushroom, and a flood of little red crab-like creatures streams out of the hole, scattering across the smooth silver surface. 

Camile wonders if she should be grateful Young didn’t turn that rage on her.

“We ensured that they survived,” she says. “That was the right choice.” She doesn’t voice her quiet hopes. _They’ll retake the ship._

_They’ll come back for us._

~*~

In the evening, the air grows chill. 

Young starts a fire, ringed with red rocks, yellow light flickering sporadically off of the arches nearby. Camile leans back, against one, stretching until her aching muscles popped, one by one. 

“You a boy scout?” she asks.

“No.” 

Of course. Air Force survival training. 

“I was,” she says. 

That snaps him out of his quiet anger, for a moment.

“I had a membership card and everything.”

“You were a Boy Scout.” 

“I was.” 

He shakes his head, and returns to the fire.

“It was a joint program,” she says. “Run by the Boy Scouts. You had to join to be a member, and so they waived the rules.” 

“You know how to make a fire?”

“No,” she admits. 

“Come here,” says Young. “I’ll show you.” 

Later, she falls asleep curled next to the flames. Her shoulder is awkwardly twisted beneath her; the skin facing the fire grows hot, while the skin in shadow grows cold. She surfaces, sleep falling away like surfacing from water, to switch positions, and finds Young gone. Sits bolt upright, heart pounding, and reflexively gropes for a weapon, when he returns, zipping up his pants.

She flushes, feeling foolish.

“Go to sleep,” he tells her. 

~*~

She’s not ashamed to admit that she couldn’t survive on her own. 

This isn’t her skill set. She thrives in a world of pinot noir, pinot grigio, and sauvignon blanc, of Whole Foods and yearlong subscriptions to theater companies and museums. The transplant to Icarus base was awkward enough, but she managed, because she was firm, and she was strong, and she knew what she had to do. 

This world is beyond her experience. 

She watches Young sweep a hand along morning stubble, and she decides to believe that he couldn’t survive on his own either.

~*~

Later, Young is gone; she rolls some of the white material firm between her palms, and sets it on the fire to burn. 

“Is this how it’s going to be?” she asks, when he returns, with a bag full of the crab creatures. Some are still trying to scuttle free, squirming in a pile of the corpses of their fellows. The clicking and scrambling of their desperate attempt at escape sickens her. “You go out and hunt, I manage the fire?” The stereotypically feminine nature of the role seems brutal and horrible and funny to her. 

“You got any better ideas?” he asks, curtly. 

She doesn’t. 

She closes her eyes, later, and bites into one of the crabs. 

It’s delicious. 

~*~

Camile Wray hates Everett Young.

He’s dangerous. 

Used to getting his way. 

Smarter than people think. 

He’s a murderer. He left Rush to die. A two-timing, abusive bastard who cheated on his distant wife to get his military subordinate pregnant.

Any respect Camile has for Young has long since gone. 

(Or, at least, this is the lie she tells herself.)

~*~

Images rise before her eyelids, when she goes to sleep. Curve of a shoulder, as she slides her arms around a slim waist. Hair curling, falling over pale skin. The feel of air between her teeth as she gasped for breath, cut off too quickly by lips smooth, waxy with lip balm, always that same flavor. Body Shop cocoa butter. She can remember the smell now. 

She cries and shivers herself to sleep. 

~*~

In the morning, their roles are reversed. No longer is Young tightly coiled, a spring of fury only waiting for an excuse to unleash. That’s washed away. He’s calm. And it’s Camile who can’t stop moving, twitching, shivering not with cold but with fear or shock or grief or some emotion that can’t express itself any other way.

“I can’t believe I’m stuck here,” she snarls, “with _you_.”

Of all the people, the one she hates the most. 

He eyes her, evenly. 

“Look at you!” Her voice is unfamiliar to her. Hardened. “You’re just giving up! You’re sitting there catching crabs when we should be going _after_ them!” 

She understands the illogic of her words. They grow from frustration and fear, from the bitter seeds of the thought that, maybe, she will never see another woman ever again. Never another human but Everett Young. The idea is too big to swallow at once. She thinks it’ll take years. 

The idea of ‘years’; that, too, is too big to swallow. 

“We’re gonna be okay,” is all he says, finally, when she’s screamed herself out, turned into a trembling curl braced against an arch. 

~*~

A week in she wakes up feeling sweaty, bloated, thirsty. When she shifts, there’s a slickness between her legs.

She groans, pressing a palm against her forehead. The days; she’d forgotten to count the days. Twenty-eight days since –

“What’s wrong?” Young asks, as he steps into the clearing. He knows, somehow. 

“I,” starts Camile. “I – it’s nothing.”

His eyes narrow. 

She curls up, trying to think what to do next. Spend a week wading in the stream they found? Scrunch up the cloth of her underwear? 

Her eyes fall on Young as he dumps the supplies out of his pack. It has two pockets, a thin cloth barrier between them, and as she watches, he slices out the cloth, and starts cutting it into strips. 

He hands one to her, his fingertips brushing hers.

“You can wash it in the stream,” he says. “When it gets soaked.” 

She nods, her mouth tightened into a line. Grateful. 

~*~

They gradually cut across the forest, and make it to the razor-red mountains. There, in a fissure, they take shelter as rain rushes through time-worn rivulets, an icy patter that cools the air around them. 

The fourth or fifth time Camile shivers, Young speaks up.

“Come here,” he says. 

“Excuse me?”

“We’ll share body heat.”

She snorts, at the idea. Ridiculous.

“There’s a reason it’s a cliché,” drawls Young, “and that’s because it works.”

“I’m sorry, Colonel,” says Camile, “I’m not going to get into a situation that sounds like it’s out of a bad porn movie.” 

“It’s not sexual.”

“With you, how can I be sure?” 

It’s a harder dig than she intends. As far as she knows, he’s only had the one affair. But for someone never unfaithful, that’s enough. Isn’t it? 

She takes a breath. “Don’t tell me you don’t like the idea of a lesbian cuddling up to you.” Turns it into a joke. Not a good joke, but a joke nonetheless. Maybe he won’t take offense. 

There’s a long pause, from Young. Camile tenses. 

“I’m not sure there’s a right answer to that question,” says Young, finally. 

Camile laughs, and shivers again.

“Come here,” says Young, and this time, she does. Wet clothes clammy between them, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her back. After a moment, he pushes her so she’s sitting up, pulls her jacket off of her shoulders, and lets her settle down again. This time, draping the jacket over her, from the front. 

“Any particular reason you’re taking such good care of me?” she asks. 

“You can’t take care of yourself.” 

The words don’t sting. She recognizes that there’s honesty in it, but she suspects that there’s more. 

“You could take care of yourself just fine without me,” she points out. “Better. You wouldn’t have to worry about another mouth to feed.” She pauses. “Isn’t that the military way? Efficiency? Necessary sacrifices?” 

“It’s not necessary.”

“What if, someday, it is?”

“It won’t be.” 

There’s a singleminded assurance to his words. She could believe it. Or she could doubt it, and doubt him. She considers the two choices, diverging paths, with the weight of Robert Frost and his two diverging roads in a wood. 

_The one less-traveled by._

“I trust you,” she says. 

His arm tightens around her shoulders. 

~*~

Camile Wray hates Everett Young.

Doesn’t she? 

She wonders if the change is some more innocent variant of Stockholm Syndrome, if the contrast from brutality to protectiveness has set off some deeply evolutionary spark of dependence, in her. 

~*~

It’s dawn when they see it. 

At first, mistaken for one of the mountain’s spirals, but as they travel across the terrain, it doesn’t move with the rest of the range. The sunlight reveals that it’s black, not red. 

A long, rough, exhausting day of mountain-climbing, using the new muscles that have started to show, outlined through her skin, and Camile and Young set their eyes on a monolith, growing sharp and tall from the valley below. 

A familiar monolith.

The strange planet they came across. The _constructed_ planet. It had the exact same thing. 

Fear and hope entwine in her chest. 

She and Young start stumbling down the slope, together, without discussing it.

~*~

The surface is black and smooth, like obsidian. 

Once, Camile attended a summer camp on archaeology. They spent days inside a old colonial house, turned into a museum, the buzz of fans substituting for air conditioning. Then one day, long sleeved shirts and long pants, and they knelt on tarps underneath scrawny trees and learned how to flake off bits of obsidian to form shapes. Like the Native Americans. 

She remembers being sticky with sweat and disproportionately proud of her rough arrowhead-shape, as she runs her hands over the monolith. There’s something staticky and warm about it, even as the air grows thin with winter cold. 

“There’s no opening.” As though she expected there would be one. 

“Let’s make a camp,” he says. 

~*~

Camile sleeps curled up behind Young, between him and the spire, head pillowed on a backpack. The warm obsidian presses into her spine, and she can feel it against each vertebra. 

Her arm wraps around him, hand spread on his chest. Her nose touching the back of his neck. She’s noticed that when she sleeps like this, he stays still, until morning; if he isn’t touching her, he’ll get up, before dawn, restless. 

This way, he sleeps better. 

It’s her own way of protecting him.

~*~

She dreams of static electricity and stars, spinning into fire from dark, empty void. 

She wakes up to a humming, against her spine. The whole tower vibrates, and she scrambles to her feet, pulling Young up with her. They back away, not more than twenty feet – funny, how that seems like a safe distance. For all they know, this tower could take the whole planet up with it, if it decided to blow itself up.

After a time, it stops. 

Not more than an hour after that, as soon as they’ve decided that leaving is the best option, getting as much distance as possible between them and the monolith, she hears the distant crackle of atmosphere breaking. 

She peers up, eyes shaded by the curve of her fingers, and eventually she spots a black speck, veering down towards them. 

The instinctive reaction is to freeze, in panic, or to run. She lets her hand rest on Young’s shoulder, and the panic dissipates. Whatever the craft is, they’ve seen Camile and Young. There’s no use in running. Little use in hiding. 

And then the ship gets close enough, and –

No, it can’t be.

Camile’s heart leaps in her chest. Another smooth veer, cut to brake against the gravity, and she lets out a little noise, an involuntary sort of reversed-gasp. 

Before she knows it, her arms are tight around Young’s neck, and she’s crying in relief, in shock, in the expectation of joy. His embrace is just as tight, and he spins her through the air, setting her back onto the ground in time enough for their lips to brush together.

It’s an accident, but hardly worth remarking over. There are more important concerns at hand.

The ship is one of the Destiny’s shuttles.

~*~

“The ship was in FTL,” explains Scott, on the way back up, the Earth gravity on the shuttle heavy enough to give Camile a headache, before they even get back to the ship. She watches the white and red of the planet recede into the distance, morphing from plane to sphere as she watches. 

“Then the whole thing started shaking, and next thing we knew, we were here. In orbit around the planet. I can’t explain it, sir.”

~*~

The ship is too warm, too heavy, and Camile’s arms get tired of hugging. She and Young are separated, and it makes her relieved and anxious. She first takes a shower; next, brushes her hair. Next, gets the story of how Kiva was defeated, the fight, the imprisonment of the Lucian Alliance soldiers. She declines visiting Kiva in the room where she’s imprisoned; instead, falls onto her bed, expecting to pass out immediately, exhausted in mind and body and spirit.

Instead, she watches the stars pass, outside her window, for hours.

She gets up, finally, dressing in some clean clothes that aren’t hers, and steps out into the ship. 

She watches, from a distance, as Young takes command of his soldiers again. The weight that was gone from his shoulders, down on that planet, is back. She wonders what that means.

~*~

It’s simple work to bump herself to the top of the communication stone schedule. 

But she stares at Sharon, edgy in a skin that isn’t her own, wondering if there’s a good way to say _I think I might sleep with a man_. Wondering where that thought came from. 

Sharon pours a glass of pinot noir, and opens a clear plastic container of Whole Foods olives. There’s a little shot glass full of toothpicks next to the plastic. 

The luxury of it drives Camile into the bathroom, where she heaves up her guts in a series of choking gasps that leave her throat burning and her mouth sore and sour. 

~*~

Sharon soothes sweaty hair from Camile’s forehead.

Camile wishes for the visit to end. And she hates herself for it. 

~*~

Once back on the ship, she spends another sleepless night staring out the window. She considers giving in and going to find Young, but eventually, she falls asleep.

The whir-rotate of the door’s locking mechanism wakes her up, blinking, sitting up to brush her hair out of her eyes. 

It’s Young, at the door. 

Once, when Camile was nineteen and in college, she fell into a relationship with a woman who liked saying that everything she did was for the best, that she had Camile’s best interests at heart. That she knew Camile better than Camile ever would, and that Camile owed her, for that. Camile was vulnerable, at the time. She didn’t believe that abuse could happen to her. She didn’t recognize it until it was too late. 

She knows how to recognize it, now. And she knows when it’s not there. 

There’s a difference between protection and control. They relate, but there’s a difference. 

“Come here,” she says. 

“I didn’t come here to—”

“You just want to sleep,” she interrupts. “It’s all right. I get it.”

She curls up behind him, arm over his waist, and dreams. 

~*~

She bumps herself to the top of the stack again. Returns to Sharon, and the quiet in the house is palpable.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever come back,” says Camile. “And I won’t be the same if I do.” 

It’s the hardest thing she’s ever done. She holds Sharon’s hands. She cries. Sharon cries. 

But, in the end, as she steps out of that house, it’s a release. The cutting of ties that were holding her here, when her heart and her mind had to be _there_. 

If not for the Destiny, she would have stayed with Sharon forever.

“I love you,” she whispers to the drizzling rain and the distant sounds of traffic. 

~*~

“I’d like your input,” says Young, one day, as she and he and Rush stand around a console together. 

Camile blinks, and immediately, the issue they’ve been discussing flees her mind entirely. “I’m sorry?” she asks.

“Your input,” repeats Young. “What do you think we should do?” 

She scrambles for thoughts that shift through her brain like greased grains of rice through loose fingers. “Right,” she says, and she tells him her opinion. 

He nods.

And he takes her suggestion.

~*~

She’s in the loop, and her opinion matters. Is this what it took? She can live in the delusion of being a hero again. 

~*~

She’s surprised at the feel of him inside her, when it happens. Hasn’t slept with a man since she was young, experimental, but he’s gentle where it counts, even as his fingers dig into the sheets, leaving six long folded furrows in the cloth, clenched between his fingers. 

She understands. His need is greater than hers. But hers is great enough.

The climax takes her by surprise. Something about him, his masculinity, leads her to believe that she wouldn’t, but he pays attention, he helps her along. Physicality does the work that her mind can’t. 

And after, she gasps, her heart beats, and she reaches out to touch him. 

Her touch is welcome; the hand that skims down her spine, gathers her against him is welcome, in turn. The fragile intimacy of nakedness feels like a natural step along their progression, and she doesn’t have to hate herself for it. 

~*~

Take your comfort; give him an outlet, a focus for his pain, a release. Give in to his desire for your protection, and give into your desire for his. Power flows one way, flows another; who’s to say who’s really in charge?

“I love you,” he tells her, and she believes it.


End file.
